I realised to day that the next instalment of my fifty two acts project (on target to be posted today) marks the quarter mark for the practical component of my doctorate. I am thrilled to bits with the way it is going, especially since I have found many of the creative projects growing and leading in new directions, giving the project the kind of momentum I was hoping for. Creative sustainability was definitely one of my biggest concerns with the format of the project, but when I look back over the work that I have done in the past three months I definitely feel that I have that three times over left in me. My biggest challenge now is to make sure the weekly creative works stay roughly on theme and all work towards the greater goal of answering the question “how can cyberfeminism practice and Web 2.0 applications be used to recode gendered representations of women on the Internet?” as initially asked in my research proposal. I am also concurrently working on the exegesis (a rationale type document accompanying the work), which is expected to be roughly 30,000 words, and will also seek to answer the research question.

One of the biggest things that has helped me stay on track with the writing side of things is the 500 word challenge. Read the rest of this entry »

Act 2 is now up on Fifty Two Acts, that is two down, only fifty more to go 🙂 For this weeks act I created and uploaded an animated icon, it is linked to my wordpress account rather than a specific journal, so it will also be my icon for this blog as well as the fifty two acts site. Tomorrow I am planning to upload larger versions of the images that I used to create the icon and some technical information about the process I used to create them.

Yesterday I put up my first ‘act’ at 52 acts, it is a slideshow introduction to cyberfeminism. A nice gentle way for me to start the creative year, which is having a great creative effect on me – I am already excited about next weeks act, and seriously reflecting on this weeks. I have thoughts brewing on ‘the light and dark of cyberfeminism’, something I don’t think I touched on in my introductory essay.

Hello World! As the name of this blog suggests I am a researcher/artist. I am interested in both traditional academic research and practice based research. I am currently a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate and my current work is focussed on using the live-web as a cyberfeminist tool/space/network.

The ‘Diary of a Research Artist’ blog is my reflective journal. This is the space I use to collect, collate and ruminate on ideas, note and discuss the works of others that are relevant to my research, and catalog my general progress. I have been using an online reflective journal since beginning my DCA (though sparingly at first), and my previous journalings can be found here at my original live journal. However, because I am in a more prolific phase of my DCA I have decided to move over here to wordpress, just because of the different kind of functionality it offers.

An online reflective journal is a very special, liminal, public/private space for me. It is public, and I welcome comments and feedback from readers, but at the same time it is a very personal, vulnerable space for me too, many of the ideas that will be kept here are just seeds of something that may grow into something amazing, or may never sprout at all. Sometimes I feel quite awkward publishing fledgling thoughts, but I feel quite strongly about making my research process as transparent as possible, both for my own records and for others who, like me a lot of the time, wonder what this research art thing is all about.